, or used
charms "scho sould be brunt in asches to the dead without dome or law, and
that willinglie, of hir owne consent." For Katherine's curses had wronged
both man and beast, which evil thing she had brought to pass by the power
of the devil her master. However, she was forced to undo her evil, and by
laying on of hands cure the sore she had made: so she got off with this
smaller punishment of branding, and a rebuke. And there was John Sinclair
tried that same year; a cruel villain to others, if loving to his own. For
under silence and cloud of night he took his distempered sister, sitting
backward on the horse, and carried her from where she lay to the Kirk of
Hoy. Then a voice came to him, saying "Seven is too many, but four might
do;" and in the morning a boat with five men in it struck on the rocks,
and four perished, but one was saved; by which fiendish and unholy
sacrifice John Sinclair's sister was cured. He was proved to be their
murderer, for when the dead men were found, and he was "forcit to lay his
handis vpoun thame, they guishit out with bluid and watter at the mouth
and noise." John Sinclair's thread of life needed no more waxing to make
it run smoothly and easily. The hangman knew where the knot lay; and cut
it to the perfect satisfaction of all the country.

BESSIE BATHGATE'S NIPS.[33]

A year after this Bessie Bathgate, spouse to Alexander Rae, fell into
trouble and the hands of the police. George Sprot, wobster, had some cloth
of Bessie's, which he kept too long for her thinking. She went and took it
violently away, and nipped his child in the thigh till it skirled, "and of
which nip it never convalesced, but dwamed thereof and died by hir
sorcerie." Also, said Sprot's wife, giving her child an egg that came out
of Bessie's house there struck out a lump as big as a goose egg upon the
child, which continued on her till her death, which was occasioned by
nothing else than this "enchanted egg." Furthermore she threatened Sprot
that "he should never get his Sunday's meat to the fore by his work;" and
he forthwith fell into extreme poverty, by which her words came true. To
William Donaldson she said--he outrunning her as she chased him to beat
him for calling her a witch--"Weill, sir, the devill be in your feit," and
he fell lame and impotent straightways, and so continued ever since. Other
things of the same kind did she, bewitching Margaret Horne's cow that it
died, "and that night it died there wa